Occasionally I will tune out of politics, especially when it goes quiet. It’s really not healthy to expose yourself to the daily torrent of miserable news without a break. The basic gist of politics right now is that the cost of everything is going up by more than you can afford, your job is being abolished, the things you enjoy are being made illegal/prohibitively expensive, they're devaluing your assets, replacing you with sexually incontinent low-IQ third worlders, and they want a big war so they can send your children away to die.

The future is that you will work to your grave and the moment you can’t afford your mortgage/rent, you’re either in the street or in a HMO, sharing with a bunch of strangers. Your pension will be worthless at this rate, especially if politicians appropriate the power to decide how it’s invested, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to take things like electricity for granted in a few years time.

Depressingly, most of these things are wholly self-inflicted. Things could be turned around in the meantime, but only by a razor sharp government with a clue what it’s doing. That just seems unrealistic for Britain.

I make no predictions about the next general election. It seems certain that the Labour vote will collapse, but the degeneracy and rank stupidity of the Green Party means there is no obvious place for the liberal left vote to go.

We will know more which way this goes very soon. Labour is on track to lose up to 1,800 councillors. If Labour performs the way we think they will in the local elections, it is likely that Keir Starmer will be given his marching orders, giving way to something even more unwholesome. One pundit suggests the bond market is starting to price in more socialism. The 10-year gilt yield will go through 5% — and the next PM won’t last five minutes.

As of late April 2026 the 10-year gilt yield is already sitting at 4.93–4.99%, the highest in years. Markets are grinding higher on sticky inflation, weak growth forecasts, energy shocks from the Middle East, and scepticism about any government’s fiscal credibility. A clean break above 5% would be brutal for mortgages, debt servicing, and whatever fiscal headroom the next lot think they have.

It seems, then, that we could be looking a bigger crisis, bringing about a much earlier general election. If Starmer goes then it is likely we will see a full-blown outbreak of Looney Tunes civil war on the left. Angela Rayner is the name that keeps surfacing, and unless I’m wildly out of touch, absolutely nobody outside the Westminster bubble seriously sees her as a viable proposition. Rayner is the bookies’ favourite, but she remains a polarising figure outside the activist base. A leadership contest could easily fracture Labour further between the soft left, the unions, and whatever remains of the centrists — handing Reform and the Tories a clear run in any early election.

What we’re likely to see, though, isn’t just anti-incumbent politics. Rather, it is structural fragmentation. First-past-the-post is breaking under multi-party reality - and virtually anything can happen, where turnout (unpredictable as it is) makes all the difference. Britain is becoming politically unstable and that’s not going to change for the foreseeable future.

Supposing we see a Reform/Tory coalition, we know that Nigel Farage isn’t up to the job and will be gone in under two years, perhaps handing the reins to Zia Yusuf, and it is likely to produce a chaotic government that’s big on promise but short on delivery, walking into ambushes and making problems for itself against a backdrop of strikes and unrest. They’ll do a few good things then run out of steam as they disintegrate, by which time the Tories might well start looking like a recovery option. Populism is likely to fail by way of its unpreparedness.

Here is where I concur with the influential X account “Drukpa Kunley”. “Though Populist governments will start to come to power in Europe in coming years probably inevitable many will be turfed out for inadequacies and you’ll have to wait until Second Wave Populism to see sustained results.”

First-wave populism (Reform, AfD, etc.) excels at channeling rage and breaking the Overton window. It is far less good at the grinding work of statecraft: detailed policy, competent personnel, and surviving the inevitable media-lawfare ambushes. A chaotic Reform-influenced government that delivers some wins on immigration and net zero but fails on growth and living standards would simply discredit the brand permanently - proving the sceptics right that rage alone is not a governing strategy..

This is precisely why I wanted to see something like Restore Britain, with a more serious agenda than Reform, but what we got was slop-tweeting from Rupert Lowe, zero policy development, and the rather frank admission from Lowe that if Restore doesn’t win in 2029 then he’s off elsewhere. What was actually needed was something that presumes Reform incompetence, building for the moment when it imploded. A ten to fifteen year plan.

There was never any possibility of replacing Reform as the default anti-incumbent party in the interim. Reform has brand recognition and exposure that Rupert Lowe simply cannot match in a short time. Unless you happen to be following Restore figures on X its political footprint is non-existent. Having deliberately steered my X algorithm away from the fringe right, even I’m surprised by how little reach it has.

Again we are confronted with the sad fact that the right doesn’t want to do the hard yards of starting from scratch. They want the solution delivered to them on a plate by somebody else and looks to the same handful of Ukippy flunkies to produce it.

Britain’s political system is fragmenting under first-past-the-post while facing deep structural crises that no single election will fix. The most likely path is continued instability, weak governments, and accelerating public disillusionment until a genuinely competent “second wave” emerges — or until something breaks. The latter seems more likely.

Ultimately, the public can persevere if there is light at the end of the tunnel. But there isn’t even a glimmer. Hardworking people have to endure increasing job insecurity, shrinking buying power, exorbitant bills and diminishing hopes of ever reaching a state of financial security. The ongoing conflict with Iran has pushed things to the brink. One more global shock could be the thing that ends the world as we have known it.

The other day I was a bit early picking up my other half from the station so I stopped at a local Ford dealership to have a look at some of the used cars on the lot. Occasionally I have flights of fantasy about owning something a little sexier than a ten year old Vauxhall.

As it happens I quite like my Insignia. It’s not a performance car but it’s a competent motorway cruiser and it’s very nimble on the back roads, and though it’s a contentious thing to say, I think the Insignia is a good looking car. It’s good enough for my purposes.

I have to say, it certainly wasn’t my first choice of car. I wouldn’t have minded something a bit more prestigious but I’ve had German luxury cars before and they’re nothing but expensive sensor faults and non-mechanical problems. I went with the Insignia because of its ubiquity. A full round of new brake discs and pads doesn’t break the bank, and when you open the bonnet, if looks positively agricultural. It’s very simple to maintain to the extent that even I can do certain repairs with the aid of a YouTube video.

What lets it down is the fuel economy but to get better economy in a similar spec car I would’ve had to buy smaller which doesn’t really do for a tall chap like me, and it turns out that economy comes at a premium. The cheaper they are to run, the more expensive they are. A low mileage Ford Focus would have cost more than my Insignia. On balance, I think I chose very wisely. My car is a masterclass in adequacy. It does what I need it to do and no more.

That is essentially my baseline when looking for a new car so at the Ford dealership I sat in a a newish Focus, just to see what it was like. The first problem was putting the seat back far enough. It’s on an electric motor and it’s slow. The second problem is that everything is now a function on a screen on the centre console. This common for new generation cars. Absolutely everything computerised on the Tesla.

I hate this. I just want to be able to reach down and press a button or pull a lever without taking my eyes off the road. I don’t want to have to pull in and navigate function menus just to adjust my wing mirrors. Then there’s the other problem. It was too small. I don’t especially need a larger car but when you move down a size bracket, everything else including the seats and steering wheel are scaled down a little bit. I just don’t like sitting in small cars (even though the new Focus is huge by contrast with its predecessors).

I was disappointed by this because I do actually like how it looks and it gets better economy than my Insignia. But with that goes the new breed of smaller capacity engine with all kinds of accoutrements to make it do the same thing. And with that goes a whole new level of complexity and expensive points of failure.

The problem here is that isn’t just the new Focus. I had a look at a couple of other cars on the lot, and the choice is limited. Almost every other car is an SUV now, and I don’t want an SUV and I don’t want a complex driving interface. It’s all academic since I will not be able to afford one this side of 2029 anyway, but this will be the choice in the future. Ford has discontinued the Mondeo and Vauxhall has shit-canned the Insignia. All you can get now is bloated, boring, expensive, complicated and slow.

As for going electric, I have not yet seen anything that persuades me I want that level of inconvenience in my life. My benchmark is that I want to get from York to Fairford and back without having to recharge. There are no charging points at airshows. Despite the leaps in recent years, the range problem is still a problem, and the daily reality of owning an EV just doesn’t appeal to me.

The problem here is that with all new cars essentially being shit, is that this shit is the feed stock for the used car market, which is causing problems for the sector, People can’t buy the used cars they actually want. Buying a used EV is a roll of the dice, and buying a used hybrid could mean buying a very expensive lemon.

Because of this, normal cars like mine are actually holding their value quite well. I’m not the only one who just wants a normal road car that doesn’t require a computer science degree just to switch on. Only we’re not even allowed to have those. The government is now punishing drivers of older cars by pushing road tax up to £760. You’ll have to pay that just to put an ancient V6 Mondeo on the road. You are only allowed to drive expensive, bloated, boring and complex machines and if you can’t afford one, then tough. Then if you buy what the government is nudging your towards, they will shift the goalposts.

Depressingly, the EV mandate only makes this worse. European car manufacturers are compelled to manufacture cars that people don’t want to run on electricity that we don’t have, which we can no longer even afford to make thanks to Net Zero, so China is dumping its EV surplus on us - which will either lead to new tariffs ensuring nobody at all can afford a car, or the complete death of the European car industry.

There are lots of moving parts right now that disrupt the auto industry, not least the war in Iran, and the skyrocketing cost of diesel, but with the Labour government looking at a per mile tariff for EVs, there’s no way for the motorist to win. The bottom line is that they are killing off personal mobility.

For my part it means soldiering on with my ten year old Vauxhall for as long as it can cope with me as a driver. Only we won’t end up like Cuba with people maintaining old classics because the government will price them off the road. Those in the lower income bracket will simply have to give up motoring entirely, which is ultimately what the uniparty wants.

There is, however, a certain logic to all this. If the objective is urban densification, and to reduce the overall number of road journeys, then the motorist does have to be squeezed, but this creates an yet another problem when people are electing to move out of the cities to get away from third-worldism and into dormitory estates on the outskirts which necessitates a car in order to commute. The government’s solution to commuting is to eliminate jobs so people don’t have to travel at all.

In the meantime, those of us on modest incomes who still need to get around will be running older, thirstier cars weaving between potholes created by boring new SUV bricks handed to people with fake disabilities. Long gone are the golden days of motoring when you could pick a newish Audi A4 for £7k and actually drive it. You are now condemned to bland techno-junk if you can afford to drive at all. One by one, the little things that make life in Britain worth living are being erased.

The Renters Rights Act is having predictable effects. We now have mass evictions as landlords sell up, a huge fall in the number of properties available to rent, landlords/letting agents intensely vetting tenants, and mega-landlords taking over the market. Anybody who understood the basics of the housing market could see this coming a mile off.

This is exacerbating an already acute crisis. Many renters are clinging on by their fingernails. Self-styled “working class academic”, Lisa McKenzie, complains on X:

Brilliant just received a letter from my landlord putting the rent up another £520 a year that’s my holiday gone. I know people who go to work aren't entitled to holidays or to live on their own or to have the heating on. What wont we be entitled to next year? At what point does this end? I know families eating from foodbanks to service the rent. I actually feel sick because I know next year when the rent goes up again I wont have much more to cut back on. I'm getting closer to the HMO. This is why people aren't saving towards pensions.

I suspect there are thousands of people in this kind of precarious position who work full time, on a passable salary, who are only one rent rise or a major bill increase away from finding basic independent living is no longer viable. In just slightly different circumstances, I could see myself in the same predicament.

What Lisa describes could be virtually any one of of us. Millions of us are only one redundancy or a divorce away from destitution. Just ten years ago, independent living on one salary was possible, albeit it in an expensive one bedroom flat, but now we see that middle income individuals who work hard are destined to live with strangers in HMOs if they want to live within commuting range of a job.

By importing millions of people, successive governments have fed the social contract into the shredder and made our own people compete for scraps while taxes destroy native wealth. This isn’t a cost of living crisis. This is a collapse of the existing economic order. The native advantage has been completely obliterated and our own people will have to fight tooth and nail just to stay on the bottom rung of the ladder. Our own people now have to compete with illegal immigrants for basic provisions. Either that or simply concede the obvious... it is simply too expensive to continue living in Britain - and there are no rewards for hard work.

Alarmingly, we’re now beginning to see the real world consequences of this (reported in The Sun). X user “Miss Jo” reports…

About 50 years ago, travelling showmen in the UK were given the right to live in the campground set up in Buckles Lane, Thurrock. The right to live there was strictly limited to travelling showmen. Now, those same showmen are letting out their places to illegal migrants.

Adverts can be seen on Gumtree, Facebook Marketplace and other local sites, showing caravans for £160/£170 per week. It is estimated that 76% of the 1,000 occupants are not supposed to be living there. Not only are there illegal migrants but there are also problems with drug running and other criminal enterprises. The council is looking the other way but local residents are becoming increasingly concerned. The situation is becoming worse, as more and more caravans are being squeezed into the space.

This is something to keep an eye on. This is one of those imperceptibly slow indicators that we're becoming a third world country. It starts off with a small caravan park but as more and more people are frozen out of rentals and mortgages (accelerating under Labour), we will see these caravan parks becoming shanty towns. You can expect to see them popping up all around the M25. We're developing our very own trailer park underclass - and it won't exclusively be migrants.

Councils have got wise to Airbnb scams, beds in sheds, and illegal subletting of social housing, so it will be displaced to this kind of ad hoc settlement, where we will see outbreaks of third world diseases.

What we need to do is drive a bulldozer through the lot of them, but councils won't do that because they will create hundreds of homeless in a single stroke, so authorities will let it fester and dump the problem on the police as they attempt to contain the criminality that goes with it.

This kind of accommodation is where London will get its supply of Deliveroo drivers, and they'll be hotbeds of organised crime. You'll see dilapidated static caravans with brand new Audis parked out front, and this is where you'll fund small scale cannabis farms and rudimentary drug labs. This issue is probably already bigger than most of us understand. It's masking a massive homelessness crisis, while also creating a huge shadow workforce that pays no tax at all.

I always joked that if my Mrs finally got sick of me and threw me out of the house, I could always set up shop in a low rent slum in Grimsby just so long as I have broadband and a nearby model shop, but that might now be out of reach, and it’s looking like many of us could be holed up in static caravans in our retirement, even if we’re mugs enough to work hard. There’s just no reason for young people to stay in Britain.

Superficially, it looks like Reform has (at last) published a meaty policy paper. The party intends to terminate Indefinite Leave to Remain. Alas, we are no further forward in policy terms. The paper is almost entirely derivative padding with the actual policy response being a mere six paragraphs.

The basic position is that Reform will abolish ILR as an immigration category completely, meaning no new awards and those currently holding it will have it rescinded. Reform will replace ILR a with a 5-year renewable visa, subject to considerably stricter criteria, bringing the UK in line with comparators like the UAE. Anyone currently with ILR will need to reapply for visas that do not offer recourse to welfare. Requirements will include:

• Much higher salary thresholds (based on a verified job offer or averaged over the 5-year period in case of renewal), with the right to bring dependants tied to thresholds that will be above median UK earnings.

• Stricter rules around good character, covering deception (around their visa application), financial misconduct, tax compliance and criminal convictions, all of which will be more rigorously checked via biometric information.

• A much higher standard of English.

Alarmingly, though, they then say “There will also be an Acute Skills Shortage Visa available for those working in national critical sectors such as care”.

This is how we got into this mess to begin with. The Boriswave is a symptom of this mentality. The idea that we have no choice but to lean on immigration where there are skills/labour shortages. In this instance, we don’t have a skills shortage or a labour shortage. We have a incentives problem. If Reform wants to solve this part of the immigration problem then it needs to publish a fundamental overhaul of the care system.

This is where we have to get serious. We struggle to recruit people into care because it is a low wage, low prestige role with limited career prospects - for what is a physically and emotionally demanding job. When you can make more stacking shelves as the Co-op, nobody is lining up to do this kind of work, so you get private equity care homes importing random Africans to do the work, who treat it as a visa backdoor for them and their families, and they’re hired whether they’re qualified or not.

This is an important policy area to look at because the sector is rife with visa fraud and illegal working. It’s an open secret because there is no local authority enforcement or surveillance. It’s also important to look at because the lack of suitable care places is how we get discharge bottlenecks in hospitals - which is a big part of the NHS productivity problem.

What we have to do is take a second look at the working time directive, reduce reliance on agency staff and have proper full time salaried roles that reflect the seriousness of the job, rather than treating care workers as bottom rung dogsbodies. We need to ensure there is a viable career path, and incentives to stay in the industry.

This is where tied housing can help. Care workers should be prioritised for social housing and have their rents substantially discounted to offset lower salaries, thus ensuring longevity. We can sweeten the deal with enhanced right to buy. Recruitment and retention policy is key.

I seem to recall the SDP mooted a national care service. This could map army structures, with care platoons assigned to districts, with a formal ranking system to provide a career path and pathways to pay increases, with master-sergeant type specialist roles that can lead to upper management.

Secondly, we have to end the mentality of dumping granny on the council. Instead of carer benefits, we need to look at tax credits for people looking after elderly parents, to ensure that families play a greater role in care work (as it should be). That we wash our hands of our elderly is why the adult social care bill has skyrocketed in recent years.

If we are going to tackle this part of the immigration problem, then we need to completely rethink a lot of the underlying assumptions about the care and welfare system. The moment you make exceptions to immigration policy as Reform has, you will end up back where you started, with unlimited immigration to solve a never-ending problem.

As much as anything, home is the best environment for elderly care. Modern care homes are miserable places where people wait to die. There needs to be a greater emphasis on supported living rather than total care, institutionalising the elderly and turning them into zombies. District care has a role to play, but more must be done to enable downsizing into adapted homes and homes for later living.

As such, there is a housing policy dimension to solving this problem - which brings me back to the point I’ve been hammering for years now. If we’re going to get to the root of immigration problems we need a full spectrum of policies, each of which will have an immigration dimension.

Reversing the Boriswave is certainly a priority issue, but unless we make the necessary structural adjustments to housing and the welfare system, ending the reliance on imported labour, we’re only one Tory government away from another Boriswave. Since there is no longer a discernible difference between the Tories and Reform, it might even be Reform that does it.

I saw a tweet the other day that said the UK is slowly becoming like Communist Cuba.

Wage compression is a serious issue in the UK. For many decades, Cuba operated under a strictly egalitarian wage system where most government employees earned roughly the same amount regardless of their profession or performance. Full time minimum wage for a 40-hour week is now £26,400 a year. For comparison, a band 5 hospital nurse earns £32,073 and a newly qualified teacher earns £32,916.

The effects of this wage compression is further exacerbated by punitive taxes imposed by the state, where anything earned after £50,270 is taxed at almost 50% when you take into account NI and Student Loan. You have a bizarre scenario where someone earning minimum wage in Carlisle or Aberdeen has similar levels of disposable income to someone earning a top 20% salary in London.

We are starting to see the cracks of this broken system with NHS Doctors striking over pay. In real-terms their pay and standard of living has been decimated. I do wonder whether many are starting to question whether it's still worth becoming a professional in the UK, given how warped the incentive structures have become.

Of itself this is an alarming phenomenon (even if the numbers are a but off) but it’s symptomatic of a broader economic crunch on the horizon. One tweeter succinctly outlines the problem. There are two economies in this country now. One is people with no debt, assets outside the system, and portable skills. They’ll be fine. Uncomfortable maybe, but fine. The other is people with mortgages, car finance, student debt, a workplace pension they don’t understand, and a salary that hasn’t kept pace with inflation for fifteen years. That second group is the majority. And they have almost no buffer for what’s coming.

Another tweeter puts more meat on the bones.

No one is prepared for how materially poorer the UK is likely to become over the next two decades. A disproportionate share of British wealth is concentrated in housing. Over 40% of total household wealth, approaching £4 trillion, is tied up in residential property.

For the past 30 years that seemingly worked very well. Housing absorbed a significant share of monetary premium in an environment defined by falling interest rates, expanding credit and persistent monetary easing.

It ceased to function purely as shelter and instead became leveraged money and a store of value. The UK faces a combination of headwinds that means this is going to change. An ageing population, low birth rates, slowing population growth and increasing capital outflows as high net-worth individuals relocate to more favourable jurisdictions in the Middle East and Asia.

At the same time, housing is no longer the only recipient of excess liquidity. The global choice for storing value has expanded and alternative monetary assets, such as Bitcoin, are beginning to compete for that premium.

The UK has mistaken housing inflation for wealth creation for three decades. What follows is unlikely to be a sudden collapse but a slow erosion of real value concealed by nominal stability. A large portion of British wealth is far more fragile than widely understood.

The entire UK economic model became dependent on rising house prices as a substitute for actual productivity growth. And we stupidly, fully embraced it as a nation. Houses going up made people feel richer, so they spent more, which generated tax revenue, which has funded public services. Now that we strip that away, you don’t just have poorer homeowners. You have a fiscal crisis because the wealth effect was propping up consumption and therefore the tax base.

As Josh Hunt puts it, “And yet the entire political conversation is still built around the assumption that growth will return, that house prices will recover, that the next budget will fix it, that someone somewhere has a plan. Nobody has a plan. Because the honest plan would require admitting that we can’t afford what we’ve promised, that the model is broken, and that the adjustment is going to hurt regardless of who’s in charge”.

This is the misplaced optimism upon which far too much rests, not least narcissistic delusions such as Net Zero. Meanwhile, entitlement is destroying the UK. Entitlement of nimbys, triple locked pensioners, tax avoiding rich, welfare fraudsters, corporations rigging the regulatory system, militant unions.

This is at a time when the labour market, the energy system, the housing market and higher education are founded almost entirely on faulty assumption of perpetual growth. There is also a pensions and senior adult care timebomb. OBR data shows UK welfare spending now at £333bn, exceeding income tax revenue of £331bn for 2025-26, the first time this has ever happened.

This is all against a backdrop of an institutionally paralysed government. My X feed lately is just a stream of serious and dangerous problems that the government is either exacerbating or simply doing nothing about.

With a little additional effort I could throw a few more grenades in to make the overall picture bleaker, but you don’t need me to tell you that we are in very serious trouble. You don’t need to be an economist. You can feel it in your bones. No first world country could sustain the sort of perpetual incompetence we’ve endured without running up a massive debt to the future.

Of course, none of this is new. I could have written this article a decade ago (and if I sift through my old blog, I probably did). It’s always just been a question of when the hammer will fall.

The catalyst, it seems, is Donald Trump. His war in Iran, unfolding concurrently with the war in Ukraine, is trashing half the world’s energy infrastructure. Consequently, the price of everything is going up, then going up some more. Even if there were a ceasefire tomorrow, nothing is going back to normal. This is the tipping point.

Though it might not feel like it, it seems Donald Trump has done Britain a huge favour. The ultimate consequence of his actions in Iran is to expose the fragility of Britain’s Ponzi economy. We’ve been kicking the can down the road for thirty years but now we’ve run out of road. The big collapse I always assumed was coming is right around the corner, and there’s no way out unless we let go of our delusions. We cannot afford Net Zero. We cannot afford our lavish welfare state. We cannot afford our entitlement culture. We cannot afford to keep asset-stripping our defences. Essentially, we are being forced by circumstances to make all the decisions we’ve deferred.

The only question now is how long it takes for difficult times to become dangerous times. We’re fast approaching a crunch point where it simply isn’t possible to meet all the demands on a paycheque. With no disposable income it is no longer possible to sustain the vast services industries, much of which turns on otherwise unemployable third world immigrants. With social cohesion already collapsing, a bad situation is only going to get worse. This is the point where managed decline become unmanaged. No-one is in control of what comes next.

The other day I wrote an intentionally controversial article. There is a place for robust polemics now and then - and the problem of feral blacks rampaging through our cities is something that needs to be addressed in uncompromising terms.

One commenter took issue with my framing. He said “There are real problems - youth crime, retail theft, the consequences of gutting youth services and policing through austerity”. Another commenter remarked “I fundamentally disagree with you and I’m horrified by your sentiment but I expect you’re unsurprised by that. I do have a question though. Is there anything that could possibly change your mind? Do you think you could possibly qualify or alter your opinion slightly? Is there anything that might persuade you that Race is not the fundamental issue?”.

Let’s cut to the chase here. Race is an issue here. What we’re seeing is something that happens on a regular basis, and the common factor in all the instances I’ve seen is that the perpetrators are black. This is the reason why spirits in the local Co-op are under lock and key when they didn’t used to be.

We used to have a high trust society where the small businesses didn’t need full time security guards and it didn’t require extra policing. What happened, though, is that certain cohorts realised they could loot shops in broad daylight without any real fear of being caught. Our unwritten social contract means nothing to these people. It’s third worldism where anything that isn’t nailed down is fair game. Consequently, we now need police and security where once they were not needed at all.

The trend is that the blacker the area, the more security you need. This is a phenomenon you can observe in the USA which has led to “food deserts”, where supermarkets have closed their doors for good, because the profit margin is wiped by by theft. In retail trade publications, grocery industry representatives cite shoplifting as a direct result of criminal justice reforms that threaten their businesses. Social justice activists blame poverty and rising costs, but we’re not seeing young mums stealing essentials. We’re seeing wholesale looting.

Here in the UK, we’re starting to see similar where shoplifting is treated as trivial by the police. The crime is seriously under-reported and the problem is so urgent police forces need to take "immediate action", according to the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee.

The Lords committee held an inquiry into tackling shoplifting in which it heard evidence from police chiefs, retailers and industry experts in May and September. In a letter, it said there were more than 443,000 incidents of shop theft recorded by police in the year to March 2024 – the highest ever since records began 20 years ago. But they were “a drop in the ocean” when compared with likely real figures estimated at 17 million annually – which has “devastating consequences for businesses and families”.

Shop theft has evolved from “individualised offending to relentless, large-scale, organised operations accompanied by unprecedented levels of violence”, it added. It said shoplifting cost the retail sector nearly £2bn last year – which resulted in price rises impacting individuals, families and communities.

What this now calls for is a concerted effort by the police and the courts to restore order. We know, though, how that will play out. Black children have been brought up with a sense of victimhood and entitlement, and race grifters will immediately claim the polite are disproportionately targeting blacks - even in areas where they are a majority.

Again we can look to Baltimore to see how this plays out, with police officers subject to a slew of unsubstantiated complains, to the extent they are hesitant to arrest blacks at all - especially when their every arrest is filmed. We then also see black juries acquitting them and politicians throwing the police under the bus. Race relations aren’t quite as bad as they are in the USA but they are deteriorating, and we are on the same slippery slope, where blacks can organised to leverage effective immunity. At no point have I said race is a determinant of behaviour, but the racial element to this problem cannot simply be ignored.

I’m not going to pretend I know how to fix this. America hasn’t succeeded if fifty years of trying. They’ve tried everything from light touch to zero tolerance, but the problems persist. For sure, we can put more police on the beat, clear the backlogs in the courts, increase the number of prison places, and invest in more “yoof clubs” but the problem is still feral black kids with no boundaries imposed by parents.

As such, it will require a social work industrial complex as we see in the USA. It requires early intervention and expensive social surveillance systems. In conjunction with this, it requires new measures to make it more difficult to sell stolen goods on online market places anonymously. There is also a flash mob dynamic to this where some of it is co-ordinated over Tik-Tok. Apparently, it’s as much a street cred thing.

Much of this is exacerbated by uncontrolled immigration where blacks simply aren’t going to learn British social customs because there are no British people around from which to learn them. We’ll eventually run out of white social services professionals able or willing to work with them, especially teachers, because the rise in dangerous misogyny is not coming from white kids. The moral panic about the mansophere is just another left wing diversionary tactic to avoid talking about race and culture.

I think we can probably do better with policing and but the problem of fatherless children going feral is very much an issue within black communities. The courts and the schools have a role to play, but on the whole it’s going to require more societal adjustments, curbs to public freedoms, more internet controls and more tax. As such, the presence of black people makes life in Britain objectively worse.

Moreover, I think our best efforts to contain these problems will fail. At this scale it’s sweeping leaves on a windy day. It will get worse because civilised people don’t want to be around the crime, the disorder and the squalor. There’s a reason we’re seeing an exodus of white people to the regions and this is it. We retreat to the safe and the familiar - and that’s how we gradually lose our cities.

What you then get is entire London boroughs where nobody pays the water bill, nobody pays council tax, paying for goods in shops is seen as optional, and all the unwritten rules than makes civilisation tick, such as queuing for a bus, simply evaporate. London bus drivers now have to sit behind reenforced glass. As such, any claim we are strengthened by diversity can only be met with a hollow laugh. The trend is South Africanisation.

The issue for me is that I cannot see the value in them being here at all. I know of no contribution blacks have made to the economic and social life of the country that makes any of this worth enduring. Even if we could successfully integrate the barely housetrained, I have to ask… what’s in it for us?

Much of the British right has a tendency to fixate on creeping Islamisation and sectarianism. While that is a major problem, less is said of our other major problem with immigration. Feral blacks. There’s been a spate of them looting in broad daylight just recently. Most can barely string a sentence together and couldn’t even perform basic menial labour.

The problem with hordes of feral black kids is they grow up to be economically and socially useless adults who breed more of the same. We're creating an unpoliceable underclass who will end up informally segregated because nobody sane wants to live within 20 miles of them. This is how we lose our cities.

You can't integrate them because they're not culturally English even if they were born here. They are victims of immigration. They know they can’t integrate no matter how hard they try, and on some level they know they’re not wanted or liked. They have no affinity for, or understanding of British culture, no connection with their own roots, and so all they have is what they learn from American blacks in the media - which is a culture that idolises ignorance and degeneracy, and promotes entitlement and greed.

This prompts the great and the good to ask what we can do about it, but there’s not a lot in terms of conventional tactics we can employ that will actually work. James Graham of Prosperity Institute says "We must have mass arrests, firm punishments and an end to the victimhood race based politics that emboldens this”.

The problem is, it won't work. Blacks know how to game the system. The first time the plod make a mistake, the blacks will riot (just as they do in the USA) and will organise politically to syphon off more taxpayers cash for yoof clubs etc, which will make no difference to their behaviour. Metropolitan white liberals will make excuses for them, and then we're back to square one. You can inject a little conservative resolve into policing but it melts away the first time some miscreant is shot in the face when they attempt to run a cop over.

Sadly, "nigga behaviour" is baked into the system. It gets to the point where no copper wants to risk arresting a black because of the bullshit that goes with it, to the extent that blacks have de facto immunity for everything short of murder, and will thus continue to fester in their own squalor.

Americans have been trying to civilise black ghettoes for over half a century and it just doesn't work. In the wake of the hit TV show, The Wire, Baltimore has become the poster boy for urban deprivation, but in recent times has reported a decline in murder but it’s taken a massive mobilisation of resources and political attention. The statistics, though, tell their own story.

About 570,000 people live in Baltimore. If 200 people are murdered in the city in a year, the average person’s risk would be about one in 2,850. But almost all the violence is concentrated among a tiny, impoverished and identifiable subset of that 570,000: 2% or less of the city. If 80% of 200 murders are in this cluster, then most people are facing a murder risk of a bit less than 14,000 to one, while the high-risk cluster’s odds are about one in 71. It’s predominantly a black problem.

This will soon be the case for London and Birmingham. Ultimately, it requires blacks to have an out. Without a path off the street, they will make their own entertainment and gravitate towards organised crime. To get anywhere close to fixing this we would need major economic rebalancing, tackling the youth unemployment problem by scrapping the minimum wage. We’d also have to restrict the flow of foreign labour that suppresses wages. I don’t see any government doing this any time soon.

Even then, I don’t see that working. Feral black kids will opt for crime before taking up a minimum wage job because there is no parental guidance. Conservatives think the answer lies in better education, and will cite Michaela school as the model to follow, but these schools are only ever as good as the parents of the children. If the parents won’t set boundaries, there’s not a lot a school can do. At best you can housetrain them, but educating them is too much to ask.

Blacks themselves have to grow weary of their own self-imposed misery. At one point we could have helped by weaning them off welfare, but all the work they could actually do is being automated or is being done by replacement migration. They are an inherently useless people, so all you can do is either wall them off and keep them as welfare pets or deport them. I favour the latter, save for a select few to keep on display in city zoos so future generations know not to repeat the mistake of allowing them here.

Whatever investment is required to civilise these creatures simply isn't value for money. As much as anything, there's nothing in it for us. At their best, they are still valueless. I don't feel any charity towards these people, nor any social obligation towards them. Their recent ancestors came of their own volition and they were not wanted. I feel no affinity for them or their culture, and I'm not parting with my money to help them. I will put my own people first.

The bottom line is that they don't belong here. Europe should club together to buy an African country and just send them there. We should promote a black equivalent of Zionism - and give them reparations if they leave. The alternative is to watch our cities slowly turn into violent slums where murder is as normal as rain.

The Scottish Daily Express reports that the SNP Government shelled out ‘jaw-dropping’ £340 million on consultancy fees for A9 and A96 to dual just 11 miles of road. New figures released by government officials reveal that £261.3m has been spent on consultancy fees for the A9 dualling programme out of the estimated total scheme costing £3.97bn by the end of April 2025. Despite this, only 11 miles of the A9 has been dualled between Perth and Inverness out of the total 83-mile project.

A detailed breakdown of the FOI can be found here. This has me wondering just why these things are so expensive these days.

I start on the basis that these reports are never wholly trustworthy and they play on public ignorance of how much major public infrastructure works actually cost. They are more expensive in Britain because of the design and environmental standards we uphold, some of which can be described as gold-plating (or rather green plating), but they‘re a good standard to aspire to. In this instance, though, the influence of climate regulation substantially adds to the cost. It is reported that…

Peatlands are increasingly recognised as valuable carbon stores, storing more carbon than all other types of vegetation combined. It is therefore vital that the ecology is not harmed.

Normally when a road is built over peat, the peat is excavated and discarded, releasing the carbon into the atmosphere and making the issue of climate breakdown worse.

Transport Scotland has chosen to take a different approach as part of an “innovative” Peat Management Plan, which seeks to reuse the peat excavated during the dualling project.

The plan was produced by Transport Scotland, in collaboration with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and Forestry Land Scotland (FLS), and aims to “minimise the environmental impact of construction by reducing the opportunity for carbon loss,” the transport authority said.

“The Plan involves forming multiple ‘cell’ like structures within the area identified as suitable for peat re-use. The cells, once formed, will be infilled with peat that has been excavated as part of the dualling construction works,” Transport Scotland said in a statement.

I can’t find any figures on how much this costs but it is argued that conventional disposal carries its own expense. Peat disposal (excavating the material and sending it off-site to landfill or authorised waste sites) is expensive primarily because of Scottish Landfill Tax, massive haulage/transport costs, regulatory permitting, and the physical challenges of handling wet, unstable peat. To me it rather looks like the scheme is only viable by contrast with the self-imposed regulatory costs of doing anything else. This no doubt has ramifications for other road building projects.

As such, there is an obvious case for some deregulation, especially anything pertaining to climate change. That said, these things are never going to be cheap. I don't think anything is served by cheaping out on the survey and consultancy work because that can bite you in the arse later down the line (not least law suits from unintended adverse consequences). I don't think it's a bad thing that we do extensive planning for water displacement and drainage. The A14 Huntingdon bypass is a great example of modern road design and it's an entire system in itself.

We could loosen the habitats and environmental requirements but then you're just committing to bulldozing the countryside without regard to the kind of country we want to live in. We should not let climate scepticism blind us to conservation. Not all biodiversity schemes are bad - and serve a useful role in flood prevention.

Maybe better scrutiny of contracts might have shaved a few million off the cost, and maybe dumping onerous climate rules would save some more, but the bottom line is that good roads are complex and they need to be built to a high standard if they're going to last - and they do, notwithstanding all the mithering about potholes.

When it comes down to it, an accountancy approach to infrastructure is not the way to go. For the most part, good infrastructure costs what it costs. The worst examples appear when the foundational assumptions are wrong (political vanity projects such as renewable energy/HS2). If anything, the high price tag is really just a an indicator how badly we’ve debased the currency.

Ultimately we have a more fundamental choice to make between the kind of infrastructure that liberates the facilitates the economy, or whether we wish to maintain a creaking welfare state that pays foreigners to outbreed us and occupy our housing stock. I would rather have Rolls Royce infrastructure than rapey third worlders. Without a fundamental shift in thinking, the kind of accountancy that critics apply to this kind of building works just means we cheap out on things we need in order to fund those things we definitely don't.

Looking at this and other polls, there is a marked decline in Reform's performance lately and I think it's going to get worse. They're adept at making noise but we're back to that old adage... the higher the monkey climbs, the more you see of its arse. They keep holding press conferences to announce defections of grifters, opportunists and deadbeats, in settings that more resemble American (commercial) evangelical churches, and people can see that, fundamentally, Reform is not a serious proposition for government.

You can still have all that glitz and glam, but on some level you have to be able to reassure voters that you are capable of forming a government and that you have viable solutions. What we're learning about Reform is that they're just not serious, they don't have answers, and they are not a meaningful departure from the status quo. We'd just end up with another chaotic government that made big promises but doesn't know how to deliver.

As it happens, I have long thought the polls were over-egging Reform, and as we get closer to the election we will see more of this gradual disintegration, especially as Reform activists become ever more disillusioned. It is highly likely that they will do quite well in the local elections, but will seriously underperform on the basis of their performance in local government where they've again made big promises on the basis of flawed assumptions.

That in my view all stems from the same basic lack of an intellectual foundation and thinking details don't matter. Reform believes that so long as they're polling well then there's no problem, which has led to this complacency. As such, they could very well implode before 2029. There's a lesson here for Restore Britain too. You cannot coast as a slop party in this game. To be taken seriously, you have to be serious.

While you can quibble over the source, Mel Stride has published a thread just asking basic questions about Reform’s proposed means of funding tax cuts, and you don’t have to be a Tory sympathiser to acknowledge that Reform’s sums just don’t add up.

This is the danger with Reform. They're making big promises about tax cuts but they have no idea how they'd actually pay for it. You might think this kind of lazy slop in election messaging doesn't matter, and maybe it doesn't, but it matters that they themselves actually believe their own bullshit. It just means another chaotic government that can't deliver on its unrealistic promises.

This, though, is why Restore Britain won’t fare any better. While many will support their hard line messaging on immigration, they’re still going to be assessed for seriousness. Folks at Restore need to understand that just because voters agree with your sentiments, it doesn’t mean they will actually vote for you. You have to pass the sniff test, and if there’s nothing beyond the hard line posturing and the lazy slop posted by the leader on X then voters will draw their own conclusions.

That said, it’s still too early to draw any solid conclusions about the next general election. Some pundits talk about the right losing to a red-green alliance, but the rise of the Greens is largely illusory, I would guess. With the Green Party holding gay bondage discos in broad daylight, it is unlikely they will hold on to the Moslem vote. I’d hazard a guess that we will see more Moslem independents prospering and any green aligned voters with a shred of decency will fold into the Lib Dems.

Either way, the polls seem to be converging in a way that suggests there is almost universal disaffection with all of the political parties, with no party capable of securing a positive mandate in their own right. All of them are gaming the system on the basis of who is the least awful - but even that isn’t a slam dunk assessment. With parties this awful, it’s unsurprising that the likes of Restore think any old slop will do, but Reform’s performance rather suggests a little bit of effort would go a long way.

I haven’t written much about the war in Iran because I simply don’t really know what’s happening. It seems to be a facet of modern wars that the more you read, the less clear the picture becomes. That’s certainly been true of Ukraine for a long time. Competing narratives emerge and you choose the one that best suits your own personal biases and political agendas.

In the case of Iran, I’ve struggled to come down hard on any one side of the debate because I don’t see an optimal course of action. You can only really look at it in terms of the national interest, recognising that we are not in the driving seat, and we only really have control over our own policy reactions.

For us, the status quo was the least bothersome, albeit with Iran using its regional influence to destabilise the Middle East, which is not without consequences for Britain. But the status quo got to a point where Israel was forced to take action. Not only has Iran been waging war through its own proxies, it has launched waves of deadly attacks against Israel and shown a willingness to use any and all weapons at its disposal.

On that basis, Israel had no choice to to take pre-emptive action to ensure its own safety. While Israel’s missile defence shield is powerful and quite effective, it simply cannot be a sitting duck, and it would seem that President Trump agreed. If there was any danger of a nuclear armed Iran, which would have given the regime the freedom to act without retaliation then that would not be a good thing for anybody.

Having taken that decision, America then runs into what most of us assumed was a well understood lesson. You cannot affect regime change with air power alone. That leaves America unsure what to do next since there is no real appetite for putting boots on the ground even in a limited capacity.

That then leaves the mullahs in charge, and free to harass shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, bringing half the world’s economy to a standstill. Which is really not good for anybody either. As such, the West has to decide if it’s going to allow a kleptocratic Islamist regime to hold the world economy to ransom. Britain has decided that it will allow it, because the ruling party is in hock to British Islamists, who are now allied with the far left and the antisemitic isolationist right (which is more influential than ever). And, of course, because orange man bad.

That said, there is a certain wisdom to not getting involved. Any operation aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz will require ground forces. Naval and air power alone simply cannot do the job on a long term basis. A naval missile defence shield is a long term operation for which the technology does not exist to do it long term and cost effectively. Moreover, it seems logical that if you’re going to commit ground forces to keep the strait open then you might as well go all in and remove the regime. But that would require a multinational force. Trump simply doesn’t have the political capital to do it alone, and British forces have nothing useful to contribute anyway.

As such, it looks like America has no real option but to de-escalate, switching the focus to doing as much damage to Iran’s military capabilities as possible while it can, (which should be done for its own sake), and leave Israel to do the mopping up. But that doesn’t bode well for America in that all this operation will have achieved is to tank the world economy for the sake of Israel’s security. Given the shifts on the American right, this could well be the end of Trumpism.

That, though, depends on how you view Trump’s wider strategy, having secured alternate sources of energy and moving to cut off a key energy source to China. It’s still within the America First remit, especially if the goal is continued reshoring.

That’s great for America but less so for Britain. Britain has decided that we are going to let a dysfunctional Islamist state hold us to ransom so the first and most obvious thing to do is to tap into as many of our domestic energy reserves as possible, as quickly as possible. On that basis, Donald Trump might have done us a favour in helping to end net zero delusions once and for all. Or at least it might have done were we not ruled by drooling imbeciles who are determined to deindustrialise.

As such, it looks like we’re heading for a time of austerity the likes of which I have never experienced in my lifetime where, for the most part, the worst symptoms are wholly self-inflicted. It certainly looks like my travel plans fort the summer are in doubt with petrol prices being what they are, but it’s still the case that most of what we pay at the pump goes towards maintaining Labour’s welfare clients. Meanwhile, we have to keep subsidising useless windmills. Where it gets especially messy is that Ukraine is going all out to attack Russian energy infrastructure so Europe soon won’t have a plan B.

Regardless of Trump’s actions in the Gulf, Europe was already on a suicide trajectory, but this war has put Europe’s decline on turbocharge, and we lack the political coherence to help ourselves. It seems the only people happy about this mess are plane spotters in the vicinity of RAF Fairford. If I don’t post in the week, that’s where I’ll be.

Public Accounts Committee MPs have said the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs should take advantage of wide-ranging plans for regulatory change and consider merging the Environment Agency with Natural England.

This is not a new idea. The idea was mooted in 2012 when the last lot were banging on about a “bonfire of quangos”. The review estimated £45m upfront costs to a merger. They concluded that the time required to move to a single body, and the associated cost and complexity, means that the costs and disruption of change would outweigh the benefits for at least five years. The benefits of a single body are not only longer term but are also much more uncertain than its costs.

The review found the benefits of a single body to be modest relative to the cost and disruption, even in the longer term, and upfront costs to be substantial. That’s a point that’s lost on the Slop Right (Reform/Restore). Terminating individual bodies is not a cost-free process. It means cancelling leases, redundancy pay-offs and additional consultancy. Mergers are not straightforward, meanwhile there are some functions that must necessarily operate on their own.

Essentially you have to spend a few million to save a few million, and if you’re going to do that you need a clear idea of what problems it would actually solve. Only that doesn’t really factor into the thinking of the Slop Right. It’s purely about some half-baked notion of government efficiency, approaching it entirely from an accountancy perspective, failing to understand that nothing generates bureaucracy quite like these half-baked attempts to contain bureaucracy.

That is not to say there aren’t problems to address with running these arms separately. There is some overlap, some duplication and some contradiction, but this is necessarily solved by mergers. Every review of this type points to the need for better inter-agency co-operation but nobody ever manages to make this happen. Whenever there’s a scandal, the subsequent inquiry always reveals different agencies working in silos with no idea what they other is doing. But that can still happen in a single agency, where internal departments seldom interact even when they work on the same floor in the same building.

This intractable problem is what leads to the merger/break-up/merger cycle that keeps the system in a state of perpetual dysfunction. There’s a lot to be said for just leaving it along and monitoring it to ensure it’s doing what it’s actually for.

Meanwhile, cuts to Defra are taking their toll. Defra has already cut 15% of its headcount since March 2024, going from around 7,300 to 5,800 staff. Terry Jermy MP said the department and its arm’s-length bodies had seen “a loss of very experienced and competent staff”. He said farmers in his constituency of South West Norfolk had told him that they had found themselves telling visiting Defra officials what they should be doing. “That is a huge concern,” he said. Quite.

For as long as we approach the problem from an accountancy perspective all you’ll get is deckchair shuffling, and we’ll continue to gut that which does work to save a few quid here and there, spoiling the ship for a hapeth of tar. Ultimately, form follows function, so efficiency starts with proper mission definitions. You’re not going to get a functioning civil service from parties who don’t even recognise a need for much of it to exist.

Where bodies like Natural England are concerned, while they do serve an important function, the problem is (as often outlines) the underlying philosophy they’re working to, infused with climate change dogma and arbitrary Net Zero targets. That much is a political problem and it isn’t going to be solved by accountants.

As for the Environment Agency, with specialist enforcement functions, we bump into a familiar problem. A House of Lords inquiry has said it’s difficult to conclude that ‘incompetence’ at the Environment Agency has not been a factor in failures to prevent and effectively prosecute waste crime.

Witnesses expressed concerns regarding the effectiveness of the Environment Agency’s practices, the amount of funding available for it to tackle waste crime, and how it uses the funding available to it. The Lords were also critical of the police, saying they were ‘unimpressed’ with the lack of interest they showed in tackling waste crime.

During the inquiry, the Lords heard that over 38 million tonnes of waste – enough to fill Wembley Stadium 35 times – is being illegally dumped each year mainly by established organised crime groups involved in drugs, firearms, money laundering and modern slavery.

The inquiry also found that the Environment Agency is ‘heavy-handedly regulating permitted waste sites’ and pursuing their operators for infractions that ‘pale into insignificance’ compared to some of the serious and organised waste crime occurring outside the regulatory framework.

Commenting on the findings, Baroness Sheehan, Chair of the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee, said: “Despite the scale and seriousness of the crimes, raised by the members of the public in many cases, we have found multiple failings by the Environment Agency and other agencies from slow responses to repeated public reports to a woeful lack of successful convictions.”

This is something that requires renewed political attention, as it’s part of the systemic collapse of regulatory enforcement while the politicians are asleep at the wheel. Another re-organisation of the civil service is not the answer to this problem.

The letters page of The Telegraph is full of reactions to Ameer Kotecha's expose on the civil service. One comment that leapt from the page... "occasional interactions with civil servants made me realise that their primary ambition was what they saw as maintaining stability, and what I saw as the preservation of the status quo."

My first thought is... Good. That is indeed part of their remit. If and when change is to be made, a good case should be made for it, it should be properly planned and diligently executed. Many of our woes arise from half-arsed "reforms" which do more harm than good. The civil service is the thin beige line. If civil servants did everything as ministers instructed then nothing would work at all.

As a lapsed software developer, I have a lot of sympathy for civil servants. If some manager comes along and asks me to add a feature I won't simply obey. I have to think about whether the request is technically feasible, whether it's actually needed, what other systems it might interfere with, and whether it will even solve the problem. I need to convince myself that something is a good idea before I start meddling, otherwise I can end up breaking something that works (for which I am held accountable).

From experience, most of the requests I get are from idiot managers who don't understand the system, who think their changes are small, cost-free and inconsequential, when sometimes they might require a major change to the software architecture to do something only they actually want, isn't all that helpful, and by the time I deliver it they've probably forgotten they even asked for it.

As such, I've developed a "fuck off loop" to ensure only serious changes are made, and only when those asking for them fully understand what it is they're proposing. Any *good* civil servant will do exactly the same, especially if you have retards for ministers - which is the system default these days.

One lesson I learned in my unremarkable career as a software developer is that small details, if overlooked, can have fatal consequences. One time I worked for a mid-ranking gas retailer who underwent a rebranding exercise. One of my first tasks as a junior was to update the company logo on the gas bill invoicing system. Relatively straightforward, or so you would think.

With most commercial systems, you make your changes in the test environment, then move them across to the live version. This insulates you from most fuck-ups but it’s no guarantee, as I was about to learn. I changed to logo on the test/development version form template, which all looked fine.

What I was unaware of is that the test version invoice form had an old account number on it, so when the monthly invoice run went out, bills were paid to a dormant account and no money went into the company current account, which is something of a problem when you’re buying gas off the daily spot market.

That morning, there was a major panic in the office. The CEO was called back from his holiday on his yacht in order to mortgage the headquarters so we could buy gas, until the bank rang up to say they’d suddenly had a large influx of money into the previous account. Mystery solved. Bankruptcy averted.

This wasn’t (entirely) my fault. I was new to the company (and only a junior developer) and I’d assumed the development test version was recent (which is the usual practice). In any case, account numbers should not be hard coded on forms. I didn’t even know what I was looking at, and there was no reason I should have. I’d been tasked with what was viewed as a low risk operation and I did exactly as I was told - no more, no less.

The lesson I took from that, or one of them, was never to simply do as instructed, and never assume that something seemingly straightforward is consequence-free. What I also learned from an organisational perspective is that when you have a high rate of staff churn, where all these small lessons are forgotten, the frequency of avoidable fuck-ups is far higher. You need to retain a certain amount of institutional memory that knows what goes where and why. As such, there’s a lot to be said for unsackable developers who know how the system works and will resist changes made on a management whim. The same goes for civil servants.

While this doesn’t meet anybody’s definition of efficiency, the cost of not having that experience is far higher than paying a mid-ranking developer to sit on their arse scrolling through Twitter. I am reassured to know that there are seasoned operators in the civil service who know how to contain the enthusiasm of would-be reformers.

A GB News article was met with some dismay on X this morning.

A paedophile migrant convicted of sexually abusing a five-year-old child has won the right to challenge his deportation after a judge ruled he made an “honest mistake” in failing to declare his criminal past. Edi Cardoso Ramos, 29, did not disclose his conviction when applying to remain in the UK.

The Upper Tribunal of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber heard Ramos committed the offence in Portugal in 2012 as a teenager. He was convicted two years later, aged 19, and given a three-year suspended prison sentence, which was not activated after he met its conditions.

Ramos moved to the UK in 2018, around a year after his sentence ended. In 2020, he applied for leave to remain and answered “No” when asked about previous convictions. He later claimed he believed the question referred only to offences committed in the UK.

The form asked: "Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offence, or arrested or charged with an offence that you are on trial for or awaiting trial?"

Judge Paul Lodato ruled in his favour, allowing the case to be reconsidered and giving him the chance to fight his removal. The judge assessed whether Ramos posed a “genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat” to society. He concluded the Home Office had not shown he represented a current danger.

“Having considered this issue very carefully, I am not satisfied, based on the evidence before me, that the (Home Office) has established that the threat (Ramos) represents is a present threat,” Judge Lodato said.

Addressing the prostitution offence, the judge added: “I do not think that it has been made out that outraging public decency and soliciting indicates a continuation of a pattern of offending of the kind of which (Ramos) was convicted in 2014.”

On the failure to disclose his conviction, the judge accepted Ramos’s explanation “as being credible”. “I find that he made an honest mistake when he answered the question about his previous convictions and that his failure to disclose the material fact of his 2014 conviction in Portugal was not dishonest,” he said.

Judge Lodato said the non-disclosure did not prove Ramos posed a present threat, describing him as “a genuine and sufficiently serious threat, but one that is not present”. The ruling means Ramos can now pursue a fresh hearing in his bid to avoid deportation to Portugal.

On the back of this, some on X are calling for judges to be sanctioned. I certainly understand the impulse. But the judge here is not being asked to consider the merits of this individual, only whether the threat he poses is present, and whether his reasons for not disclosing his criminal past were plausible. That is the basis on which a fresh hearing is granted.

As such, this isn’t a problem with the judge and once again it isn’t an ECHR issue. The issue is the law and the process. One thing you notice when you study these cases in any detail is that while you may not like the conclusion, the ruling on what the judge is actually asked to assess is technically correct even if the outcome is offensive.

But it’s cases like this that add to the backlog precisely because judges have limited discretion. A functioning system would have afforded this judge to consider the public good in this matter. A basic good character test should have eliminated any possibility of appeal here.

A further amendment to the system could be that the judge can make a recommendation to prejudice any future appeal, and prejudiced rulings go to the front of the queue to secure a swift verdict likely to result in a deportation order. That said, where child sexual offences are concerned, any appeal should be flatly denied.

As I understand it, though, it works this way because if the laborious process is not followed to the letter it can be challenged. As far as oversight goes, it is not interested in the morality of outcomes, only whether the process has been followed. And that seems to be the problem throughout. It’s become a sterile technical process that barely requires human assessment much less an expensive judge. Moral judgement has been removed from the system - and only individual rights are considered without regard to rights of the public as a whole. The framework prioritises procedural purity over outcomes that keep the country safe.

What’s clear to me is that regardless of any ECHR considerations, the entire legal system has become corrupted and detached from any notion of public morality and natural justice, reducing judges to the position of speak-your-weight machines. While there are technical problems with the process, some of which could be remedied with subtle amendments, this is more of a philosophical problem where law as a whole has become a neutral procedural engine rather than a tool for a cohesive society’s survival. This necessitates deeper philosophical reorientation.

Fixing this, though, is no small undertaking. Here you have to ask how we got here. As I understand it, it’s the onset of “legal positivism”, a school of jurisprudence holding that law is a social construct, valid based on its source (e.g., enacted by a government) rather than its moral merit. It asserts that there is no necessary connection between law and morality, separating what law is from what it ought to be.

While the obvious culprit seems to be the ECHR and HRA, with everything deteriorating from Blair onwards, I don’t think that fully explains it. While I’m not a law scholar, I am a computer programmer and if there’s one thing that strikes me about modern law is its similarity with procedural coding. Computer programmes are little more than a collection of rules and judgements.

The reason we bother with computer programmes is in order to affect rapid decision making at scale. And that’s half the problem with our legal system. At its philosophical best it simply cannot cope with the workload. The asylum appeals backlog has reached a record high of over 80,000 cases and it rises by a thousand cases a week. Either a base assumption must change, or the system must be automated with minimal human intervention - which is how we drift towards the dystopia of social credit systems.

Since our concern is liberty, public morality, democracy and the rule of law, we have to change the base assumption of the system. Parliament is entitled to dictate who may reside in Britain, and the opinions of judges must always be subordinate. Technical fixes may provide some short term remedy, but the absence of moral clarity is unsustainable.

Continuing my recent theme of administrative collapse, I’ve just been looking at a BBC report from last year, noting that thousands of criminal cases - including some of the most serious violent and sexual offences - are collapsing every year because of lost, damaged or missing evidence.

More than 30,000 prosecutions in England and Wales collapsed between October 2020 and September 2024, data from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) reveals. They include 70 homicides and more than 550 sexual offences. Police chiefs say not all the cases relate to lost evidence and the figures include situations where officers may not be able to find an expert witness or get a medical statement.

However, it follows a series of damning reports about how police forces are storing evidence. A Home Office spokesperson said: “We always expect forces to adhere to the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s (NPCC) guidance on storage and retention of evidence.”

A leading criminologist says the increase was largely “a resourcing issue” brought about by cuts to police forces throughout the 2010s. And ex-police officers told the BBC it was unsurprising and the amount of evidence they deal with is “overwhelming”. In 2020, a total of 7,484 prosecutions collapsed because of lost, missing or damaged evidence. In 2024, that had risen by 9%, to 8,180.

A Peel Solutions blog posts unpacks some of the reasons for this. To understand why this is happening, we must look beyond individual errors and examine the immense pressures on the entire evidence management ecosystem. Several converging factors have created a perfect storm, stretching police resources and capabilities to their limit.

The Legacy of Decentralisation

Many experts trace the origins of the current crisis back to the 2012 closure of the national Forensic Science Service. This decision decentralised evidence storage and management, shifting the responsibility onto individual police forces. As Professor Carole McCartney of the University of Leicester notes, this left a fragmented landscape where forces, often with insufficient resources and infrastructure, were left to manage an increasingly complex and high-stakes task. What was once a national standard became a postcode lottery of capability.

The Digital Deluge

The single greatest operational challenge in modern investigations is the exponential growth of digital evidence. The volume of data from body-worn video, CCTV, smartphones, and computers has created a tsunami of information that forces are struggling to manage.

A 2022 report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) presciently warned that police forces were failing to meet the demands of the digital age. This is not just a storage issue; it is a challenge of capture, analysis, and timely retrieval. When a single investigation can generate terabytes of data, the risk of a critical piece of footage being lost, overlooked, or becoming inaccessible increases dramatically.

Resource and Infrastructure Gaps

The strain of managing this evidence is compounded by years of budget constraints and ageing infrastructure. The widely publicised 2023 Casey Review, which exposed the Metropolitan Police’s use of “over-stuffed, broken freezers” to store forensic samples from rape cases, is a visceral example of this reality. When basic storage facilities are not fit for purpose, the integrity of the most sensitive evidence is immediately at risk. This lack of investment creates a vicious cycle where forces are constantly reacting to failures rather than proactively building resilient systems.

More Than Just “Lost” Evidence: A Question of Definition?

While the narrative of “lost evidence” is powerful, some police forces argue it doesn’t capture the full picture. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) data is categorised under a code (E72) that refers to evidence being “missing or unavailable.”

Forces like Northamptonshire Police have pointed out that this category is broader than just police error. It can also include instances where a key witness decides not to attend court or a crucial expert medical report is not available in time. From this perspective, the issue is one of wider “evidential difficulties” in which the police are just one component. While this context is important for a nuanced understanding, it does not diminish the core finding that the systems for gathering, storing, and presenting reliable evidence are frequently failing.

The piece concludes that the revelation that thousands of police cases are collapsing is not an indictment of individual officers but a clear signal of a system straining under the weight of historical decisions, chronic under-investment, and the unprecedented demands of the digital age. Effective and reliable evidence management is not a back-office administrative task; it is the bedrock of legitimate law enforcement and the functioning of the criminal justice system.

There’s not much I can add to this, save to say it is another data point in the slow motion collapse of technical civic governance, where again the narrative of civil service bloat just doesn’t hold water. If anything, we need more back office administrators and police evidence controllers to take the workload off frontline police officers who are already bogged down with admin when they’re not arresting me for posting memes on X.

Were it that this was one problem in isolation, it would be bad enough but coupled with the backlog in the court system, coupled with the near collapse of the prison service, we are sliding towards third world levels of dysfunctionality.

Of particular interest is the increasing volumes of digital data, particularly as more crime moves online, potentially necessitating a dedicated police evidence data centre, necessarily requiring expensive data forensics people and data administrators. This is far beyond the skillset and intelligence of the average plod.

While the Slop Right might complain about the costs of back office administration, they are the first to complain of the consequences when criminals get away with murder. Whether or not you believe the civil service is too big, the one thing that’s clear is that there aren’t nearly enough of them where we actually need them.

Richard Tice (but dim) of Reform UK just tweeted the above charts with the caption “CIVIL SERVICE: No improvement in productivity in last 20 years & almost 40% larger over last decade. No surprise Britain is Broken - our civil service is broken.”

My question is why are we passively accepting this as a metric? How do you even measure something as nebulous as productivity in an institution as diverse as the civil service? One department might issue a million driving licences while another negotiates international treaties or drafts legislation. How do you meaningfully compare or aggregate?

Quality and outcomes are hard to capture. Processing more forms faster might look like higher productivity, but if decisions are worse (more appeals, poorer policy), society may be worse off. I don't think this metric alone tells us anything.

Moreover, I can envisage certain scenarios where we don’t want high productivity. Slow processing of asylum claims, for instance, is part of deterrence. It might work if asylum seekers living in hotels weren’t also able to work as Deliveroo drivers on the quiet.

Certainly, I don’t know how police can be measured by this metric. In the Peelian sense whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime but with the ever changing crime landscape, those metrics don’t necessarily tells us anything either. Similarly, we would not necessarily want food safety inspectors to be prosecuting for every infraction. They are there as much to work with businesses to help them improve by serving notices.

I’m sure that somewhere deep in the bowels of the ONS there is an official with an abstract metric for measuring baseline productivity, but it’s meaningless over a long time with such radical changes in the composition of the civil service. As a statistic, though, it serves the right well as a justification to do what they’d do anyway. The replies to Tice’s tweet tell us what they’re all thinking. There is an entire right wing mythos built around the civil service as being uniquely useless and wasteful.

But again, some of it works very well. I certainly have no complaints about the service from the DVLA or the passport office, and online personal interactions with government are really not that bad.

I am, of course, not saying the civil service doesn’t need some reforms or that government is working well, nor am I defending the status quo, but this narrative is increasingly alarming because of what it means in policy terms for the slop right.

They will approach civil service reform from a headcount and accountancy perspective rather than policy outcomes. It goes hand in hand with the bonfire of quangos mentality, where they’d delete things they don’t understand and implement a percentage cut across all departments - even if that means laying off probation officers and prison officers (whom we need more of) - creating more expensive problems down the line. Exactly the sort of thinking that created this mess.

Moreover, some areas require a great deal more investment. The only way we’re going to ease the backlog in driving tests is to increase the number of examiners and improve pay and conditions. The NAO reported a lack of examiners and found many were leaving "due to uncompetitive pay and safety concerns". Despite running 19 recruitment campaigns since 2021, the DVSA has only hired 83 extra examiners, far short of its 400 target.

Meanwhile, as per my recent investigations, we’re going to need a small army of trading standards officers, EHOs and other enforcement agents - locally and nationally - and part of the productivity metric there is an absence of vape shops etc. As I’ve uncovered in recent posts, there is a system collapse in technical governance, for which we will need more specialist practitioners, and major improvements in pay if we’re to entice new entrants into the field.

As such, if the right genuinely believes we have too many people working for the civil service, they need to climb in and identify who it is they would actually sack. Right now the right believes the civil service is swarming with DEI officers. The Telegraph reports that a mere 500 diversity related roles in the civil service, which may be too many, but that actually depends a lot on what they actually do.

A government source said: “These roles include teams working on ending violence against women and girls, breaking down barriers to work for disabled people and improving workplace support for women experiencing menopause. It’s typical of the Tories to oppose this work. The government has a point here. If you want to get disabled people back into work and bring down the benefits bill then it’s a worthy area of study. Is that measured in the productivity ratings?

According to Neil O’Brien MP, assuming an average salary of £55,000 for each civil servant with a DEI or similar role, the pay bill for the 510 staff would be at least £28.1 million a year - which is not nothing, but it’s peanuts in government spending terms, and so the right has a lot of work to do in identifying further cuts since they believe there are billions in savings to be had. Even then, though, there is a cost to the economy and society for not having officials doing certain jobs.

I’m open to the possibility that we could prune a hundred thousand people from the civil service without anybody really noticing, but I don’t think it’s going to come from abolishing quangos, and I don’t think that back office administrative staff are necessarily waste. I have yet to see a convincing analysis - just more of the same mythmaking.

Pruning the civil service requires granular, department-by-department scrutiny not percentage slashes or scapegoating small categories like DEI - and even then I don’t see it making much of a difference either in savings or net productivity. The big waste comes in the form of policy costs, particularly around climate change - from carbon capture storage to cycle lanes nobody asked for.

I often disregard right wing critiques of the civil service because there’s an inherent hostility to its very existence. A lot of it is informed by Clarksoneque commentary about red tape. I have some sympathy with it, but I can also see the flip side - especially in farming, when you need a level of industry surveillance for things like biosecurity, animal disease prevention, wildlife conservation and trade monitoring, while also keeping tabs on pollution and soil health. I also don’t think farms should be exempt from basic health and safety rules and animal welfare rules.

For sure there are egregious examples of official overreach and onerous planning rules, but we have seen examples of criminal acts by farmers (illegal dredging of riverbanks) and wilful acts of pollution. According to research, runoff from agriculture is the biggest cause of damage to waterways after sewage overflows.

The Thatcherite libertarian bore will often work on the assumption that because they personally don’t see the value in something then it has no inherent value, but the countryside is not a wilderness. It looks the way it does because it is managed, and it’s because of things like planning rules that much of it maintains its character.

You can argue with plenty justification that there is too much red tape, too much duplication of paperwork, and too many administrative fees (which could probably be absorbed by general taxation) but whatever the cost of obeying the rules, it’s cheaper than regular outbreaks of FMD.

If you read any generic right wing tract, they will often talk about a “bonfire of quangos” and would happily delete arms of government regardless of what it actually does, and you can tell that they didn’t even spend thirty seconds looking at why it actually exists. This is the right wing slopulism I am fundamentally opposed to.

If they were to make their case having climbed in and come up with policy alternatives, based on industry knowledge, I would be a lot more sympathetic, but most of the time it’s recycled lazy rhetoric that’s often older than me. The people spouting it have usually never run anything, have no idea how anything works yet they expect us to believe they would do a better job of running the country.

Insofar as you can persuade a libertarian bore that regulation is necessary, they then default to the classic trope of pruning back office administration - which doesn’t tend to produce greater efficiency. Bureaucracy always finds a way.

I remember some time ago, I consulted on (ironically) an MoD cost control system. Project management requires reporting on all costs from staff costs through to building materials and office equipment. Because of strict rules on software consultancy and limits on IT spend, we weren’t allowed to use an SQL database server, so were instead forced to use a system of linked Excel spreadsheets.

For those who don’t know, Microsoft Excel has its own native programming language (VBA) which was one of my specialism at the time. My job was to develop this system of linked spreadsheets to do data imports, cost projections and reports, which ended up being one of the most complex things I’ve ever created precisely because it was replicating the functions of an SQL Server.

For the most part, it worked. It did what it was supposed to do 99% of the time. The 1% of the time when it didn’t, though, meant climbing in to debug code I hadn’t looked at for weeks, which usually means reading through it top to bottom to trace where the error is. That could end up being a three day investigation.

After six months, there was no more funding for my role, which was supposed to be a limited consultancy. I don’t know exactly what happened but what I do know is that within days of my departure, something will have broken and nobody will have had the prerequisite knowledge of Excel VBA or my design to ever get it working again.

Had they been allowed to use a SQL database, it would have had central IT support, and you could have hooked it up to Excel pivot tables that would have done most of the heavy lifting without requiring extensive VBA reporting routines, and (if civil servants had decent Excel skills) it wouldn’t have required a full time consultant to keep it running. Any which way you look at it though, it’s something that needed proper administration.

Often the complaint about the MoD is that it has no idea of overall departmental spending, which attracts the ire of Rupert Lowe types, but in reality, there is no one size fits all system for a department as diverse and security conscious as the MoD. There are hundreds of systems ranging from SQL servers through to small desktop databases, all of which require people who know the processes as well as the technology. By capping IT and consultancy spend, departments are forced to use the wrong tools for the job.

This, though, has always been the case. At the end of the day, government budgets are finite, you have to draw the line somewhere and expect your people to do the best they can with what they’ve got. That’s certainly always been the case with the army and air force. We didn’t use the Vulcan to bomb Port Stanley because it was good at it. We used it because it was the closest thing we had to a long range conventional bomber - even though it was never designed for the job. Make do and mend is the nature of the business.

What you then get, is the periodic consolidation phase of the cycle where a bright spark notices all the diverse and disparate systems with the brilliant idea of combining them all into one. That then results in even bigger, more ambitious government IT projects that end up doing a mediocre job of 90% of the tasks, leaving people like me to develop supplementary systems to fill in the gaps, and then within a few years you’re right back to where you started with hundreds of spreadsheets and bespoke desktop apps.

A wise man at Airbus once told me that bureaucracy is like a jelly mountain. You can exert pressure on it to change its shape but the moment you release that pressure, it will wobble back to its original form.

What makes the difference is administrators who know the system inside out. You can have a high rate of churn with frontline staff if the administration tier is at least consistent, but everything falls apart when administration is ad hoc, and increasingly reliant on short term consultancy and temp workers. There’s a lot to be said for retaining institutional knowledge.

What we’re now finding is thanks to efficiency purges, is that we’ve lost a lot of institutional knowledge and institutional memory that tells you when not to change things. We let a lot of experience go, only to dumb down the process and we then complain that the system no longer works.

As such, there is a certain merit in allowing a a margin of redundancy and bloat in large organisations, especially if they’re multifunctional. The right will often call for more private sector style management which will often cut everything to the bone that isn’t directly related to revenue, which is fine for commercial enterprises, but it doesn’t work in social services departments or any organisation with atypical functions.

Prima donnas like Dominic Cummings are ten a penny - who think you can come in like a Tasmanian devil, shake things up, bully the staff and turn things around, but the iron rules of bureaucracy always defeat them. They always complain about internal sabotage and entrenched interests, but the one thing that’s good about bureaucracy is that it tends to defeat disruptors. Disruptors are usually the ones who come in and wreck everything without knowing what anything does.

Again, I conclude that the way to optimise outcomes is to clarify what an organisation is for and give it proper instructions as to what is expected of it. When you have that kind of clarity you can at least measure its effectiveness. This why there is a role for specialist quangos to take care of mundane functions of government. There’s a reason why you’ve never heard of 90% of quangos and that’s because what they do is boring and uncontroversial, and they stay out of the news because they do their jobs without a fuss. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s probably because it works - and vice versa.

As such, we need to spend less time worrying about the bits that work, and more about the bits that don’t. That is not then a matter of accountants. It’s a matter for policy and politicians. For instance, I’m less concerned about the cost of the asylum system as the fact we have one at all. Meanwhile, I’d rather have the expense and overhead of a spawling estate of magistrates courts than a major backlog and criminals getting off scot free. Would-be reformers need to think about what it is they want government to do rather than how big it should be. If you want certain outcomes, you need certain inputs.

Writing in The Telegraph, civil servant Ameer Kotecha (Ex-diplomat, Head of British Consulate in Russia 2023-25) has written an expose of life inside the civil service. It’s worth a read but I always take these insider accounts with a pinch of salt because nothing I read here is unique to the civil service. He could just as easily be describing the experience of a mid-ranking bureaucrat in any British university. Public sector bureaucracy doesn't work like private sector bureaucracy because it doesn't do the same thing.

I'm often told that the private sector is not nearly as bureaucratic, but that's not my experience having worked in large organisations (from HBOS to Airbus). They are somewhat better than the public sector in that they have a fixed definition of what they're actually for. HBOS lends money and Airbus makes aeroplanes (there's only so much scope to go off the point). Government departments, though, are Swiss army knives where in any given year, the political priority is as much a surprise to them as anybody else - which necessitates more redundancy and churn.

I'm also cautious of the classic lament that so many are incompetent generalists because it works on the assumption that somewhere in the economy, there's a cadre of untapped elites who could bring their private sector experience to bear. But here's the thing... they don't exist.

The movers and shakers of upper management in most private sector companies are just as likely to the same breed of serpentine ladder-climbing LinkedIn clones, who can successfully navigate and exploit contemporary HR dogmas (which are near identical to those that exist in the civil service). They do three years as a junior executive and swan off to the next "exciting role" at the next start-up that's pissing away start-up capital like it's someone else's money.

If there's one universal facet to these people, which continues to shock me even today, is the total data illiteracy. They lack even basic Excel skills and don't have a working concept of what data actually is. As such, their approach to everything is disorganised and sporadic.

While these accounts talk about civil service culture, they are in fact talking about the culture of the middle class managerial metro-midwit (the kind of person who thinks Stewart Lee is hilarious and insightful and listens to The Rest is Politics/The News Agents). They are not unique to the civil service. They're a particular species who can't actually afford to live in London but sufficiently obedient that they have the credit rating to live within one hour of London. A similar dynamic can be observed in parliament, when you take a particular breed of party drone, pay them more than they're worth, and put them all in the same building to make decisions. It produces the same culture.

They've tried to remedy this by moving some arms of the civil service out of London, but to places like Swansea and Wakefield, where the recruitment pool is unambitious regionals who can master menial data entry tasks, but won't do anything unless they've been told what to do or how.

And this is why it's never going to get better. Here I paraphrase philosopher and comedian, George Carlin. "Everybody complains about civil servants. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these civil servants come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from British parents and British families, British homes, British schools, British churches, British businesses and British universities, and they are elected by British citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders".

This, though, is perhaps a little bit too cynical. I think the debate needs reframing. When people talk about the culture of the civil service, they are in fact talking about Whitehall, and where you have a culture problem, you usually have a definition problem. You have sprawling bureaucracies that don't know what they're actually for - and if they don't know, you can't expect anybody else to.

That's a leadership problem but it's also a structural problem. You get much better delivery when there are defined functions - which is why I don't oppose quangos. They are preferable to sprawling bloated ministries. When they work well, they’re not that bad. You might want to tweak the accountability systems, and purge the HR culture every once in a while, but organisations work better when everyone knows what the mission is.

DFID is one such example. It existed exclusively to piss away tax payer’s money and they were brilliant at it. Then you have the Defence Infrastructure Organisation. It has a limited range of boring facilities related activities and it does a passable job. It’s the headline equipment procurement that the MoD sucks at - precisely because defence priorities and requirements are always changing. That has always been the case which is why there is no era in history when British defence procurement was ever good.

Providing definition, though, is harder in organisations like the FCDO, because it’s there to advance the national interest, but we have a political and administrative class who has no idea what constitutes the national interest, and wouldn't even know where to start since generations of functionaries have been conditioned to believe that pursuit of the national interest is nationalism therefore a terrible thing in its own right. That’s a political problem. For as long as it operates on that basis, you cannot expect the organisation to resemble anything close to what it's supposed to be. It might help if it was staffed by British people, I suppose.

Where Kotecha has a point is the skills and productivity complaint, but again this is not a unique problem. He remarks that there are too few officials with a numerical or scientific background, and too many with a humanities one. This is probably reflected in the workforce as a whole. I noted yesterday that the pipeline for skilled professional enforcement is broken, meaning that we’re struggling to recruit official vets and environmental health officers. The incentives simply aren’t there.

As for the “unsackable civil servant” this same dynamic exists in councils and universities. You are more likely to be sacked for thinking women don’t have dicks than sucking at your job. In universities we also see the same drift towards a four day working week and regular long term sickness. Part of the reason for that is again a definition problem. Universities have lost touch with what they’re actually for, and are now in the empire building game.

As such, I think the problem lies in the pipeline. What we need is to dismantle the universities, restoring the polytechnics and reducing the types of courses, possibly even developing a civil service college that promotes technical qualifications in things like environmental health (since we’re going to need a lot more enforcement). Give higher education a purpose again. Meanwhile, more needs to be done to make technical governance roles attractive as careers with late career possibilities of going into the senior ranks of the civil service. We need civil servants who’ve actually done the frontline jobs.

What Kotecha complains about is also happening in the private sector. There was a time when the CEOs are energy giants would have had some energy engineering experience, but now they’re run by people with classics degrees. Aerospace appears to be one of the few remaining industries where the senior management knows how an aeroplane works. Essentially, where technical governance is concerned it’s difficult to recruit knowledgeable practitioners when we’re not producing any.

If we had people at the top who’d actually done the daily grind of social workers, EHOs, housing officers and trading standards officers, we’d be recruiting seasoned people who wouldn’t readily fall for hive fads such as DEI etc.

Leaving all that aside, though, the right wing quest for an efficient civil service is a futile one. As I keep saying, bureaucracy is a force of nature and it is the means by which humans organise their administrative affairs. The public sector will always be worse, because it has a much broader scope of complex activities, and if you’re managing a consistent level of mediocrity then you’re doing quite well. It may be expensive and wasteful by nature but it comes nothing close to the costs of not having it at all. South Africa is what happens when technical governance ceases to function.

In this, I can well believe Kotecha is correct in saying the FCDO is uniquely awful simply because Britain is no longer a coherent country, with multiple ethnic interests steering foreign policy. As such, the dysfunction of the FCDO is an accurate reflection of our dysfunction as a country, and that isn’t fixed by shuffling the deckchairs around Whitehall. How can we measure the effectiveness of the FCDO when we know longer know who we really are, and what we stand for?

A little while back I looked at the dysfunction in the meat industry where slaughterhouses were struggling to keep up with rising compliance costs, particularly veterinary fees, which stems from the widespread use of agency vets. The entire model is unsustainable and it’s part of the reason small slaughterhouses are going under.

My reading of it was that there’s been an acute shortage of qualified vets and of those we have, they’re not keen on doing that kind of work for fairly obvious reasons, leaving us importing newly “qualified” vets form Ghana to do the job (badly). There’s also a lot of institutional knowledge leaving the profession as older verts retire.

It turns out, though, that this pattern is echoed in other areas. In my previous piece I noted the collapse in local authority enforcement on everything from housing and food safety through to planning inspection and waste control. Local authority environmental health staff numbers decreased by 32% between 2009 and 2019. Around 31% of local authorities have stopped some non-statutory “discretionary” services, including business advice, to focus on essential duties, with 31% of authorities reporting that the delivery of statutory duties is at risk.

This is exacerbated by a great many people leaving the specialist roles in enforcement who simply aren’t being replaced. There’s some insight into this crisis on the Oyster recruitment website…

“The number of people applying and graduating from EH degrees is low. Those that do graduate are not up to scratch, the quality of knowledge and experience is low. They don’t need to complete as much work experience in comparison to years ago.

Years ago students would be sent across to different cities to complete a varied list of responsibilities ie. industrial areas for land contamination and air quality, 200 hours in a slaughterhouse for meat hygiene.

The authorities don’t have the time or resources to build up the graduates that would come in as their practical knowledge just isn’t there. As the teams are already full to capacity with work, giving them this is another weight, however, they understand it needs to be done to move forward.”

Head of Environmental Health & Regulatory Services, Central England Local Authority

The problems don’t end there either…

“The spectrum is too broad and this means that not all officers who qualify could hit the ground running (and sometimes it could be a number of years before they get to the desired standard). Housing is a typical case in point and does seem to be the Cinderella service for training and development too.

The focus is on the qualification and not so focused on the CPD; I have come across some officers who, once they can call themselves EHO don’t have to undergo CPD or reassessment and, in a particularly heavily regulated industry fail to stay up to date with current thinking. Think of learning to drive as a comparator.

I would like to see more focus on specialisms (I would say that as mine is the housing field), and I think the CIEH could do more to support the profession by spending less time building the generic requirements and more time honing and refining specialist skills that local authorities in particular so badly need. “

Environmental Health Manager at Midlands-based Council

As such, even if funding were available, we’d still have serious problems. Roughly 860 posts were vacant across England in October 2023. Nearly 90% of local authorities rely on agency staff due to chronic recruitment issues and a limited pipeline of new, trained officers. 66% of local authorities cited lacking a budget to train new staff, while 52% lacked the capacity to mentor new hires.

Elsewhere, the Society of Chief Officers for Trading Standards in Scotland (Scotss) which carries out its survey every two years notes that this year is the first time it has registered fewer than 250 officers. Scotss represents the 31 trading standards departments in local authorities all over Scotland.

In the latest survey it reported that 60% of staff are now over 50 and that there are “very low” numbers of younger people coming into the profession. The survey comes against a background of fears in the whole of the UK that trading standards is not financed or staffed well enough to protect consumers from problems including illegal vapes, tobacco and other products. John Herriman, chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) said: “This isn’t just a Scottish issue – it is a UK-wide challenge”.

The latest findings echo a Which? investigation from February 2025 that characterised a trading standards postcode lottery, with inadequate staffing levels in many areas – leaving millions of people exposed to crime, fake and dangerous products and scams.

Which? found that 17% of services have fewer than two staff per 100,000 people, and 57% have fewer than four per 100,000 people. Services with the least staff are predominantly London boroughs. Enfield had only 0.43 staff per 100,000, with Lambeth, Redbridge and Barnet also having less than one member of staff per 100,000 people. In absolute terms, this amounts to 1.4 full time equivalent (FTE) staff in Enfield and 2 FTE in each of Lambeth and Redbridge (including their admin support). These boroughs each have more than 13,000 businesses to enforce against and populations of more than 300,000 to protect. the results are not very reassuring…

While there are multiple crises unfolding in Britain, this systemwide phenomenon is probably the least reported because its part of the invisible tier of government that nobody really appreciates until it collapses completely. What’s more alarming about this is that a lot of these trends were entrenched even before Boris Johnson elected to import millions of third worlders who make the problems a magnitude worse.

It should be of much more interest to parties of the right because a big part of the "hostile environment" that remigrationists propose is just enforcing the laws we already have. Without trading standards officer and EHOs, there is nobody to detect black market halal meat, overcrowded HMOs, dodgy take-aways, and crooked vape shops.

Reversing these trends is not just a matter of making more funds available. It’s also a matter of rebuilding institutional knowledge, and enticing younger people to consider these avenues as a career. The problem, though, is that the likes of Rupert Lowe have declared the state the “enemy of the people” and consider enforcement officers to be nagging petty officials getting in the way of the strivers. It feeds into their “bonfire of quangos” shtick when the last thing the enforcement tier needs is more Thatcherite austerity.

The other part of this, as I alluded to in my previous post is that this kind of enforcement falls over without a functioning justice system and proper punishments. Punishments are mild and these cases are often highly complex and time consuming, when the court backlog is severe, and public laboratory services are in crisis. Again we find the entire system is heavily dependent on expensive agency staff, and institutional knowledge is bleeding out.

I could very easily develop a specialism in this crisis alone, but its turning out to be a vector point in what looks like a systemic collapse of technical governance, made all the more alarming by the fact that nobody seems to give a damn.

Everybody complains about the number of vape shops on the high street. I noted three practically next door to each other in Hull the other week. There is no possible way there is a market for these shops. I’m a regular vapist but I have never had cause to go into a vape shop for any reason.

We can take a reasonably good guess as to why they actually exist, and it turns out that many of them are operating without proper registration. There is no fear of being caught because trading standards inspections have collapsed over the years. Data reveals that 36 trading standards services reported no criminal prosecutions during the 2023-24 financial year, with some teams having fewer than one member of staff per 100,000 people.

If we had the kind of regular local enforcement it would never have got so badly out of hand, but now we’re having to launch major National Crime Agency blitzes. Recently, barbershops and other cash-intensive businesses across England were targeted by police and other law enforcement officers during a three-week crackdown on high street crime.

In total, 380 premises were visited across Operation Machinize, where officers secured freezing orders over bank accounts totalling more than £1m, executed 84 warrants and made 35 arrests. The operation saw 55 individuals questioned about their immigration status and a further 97 individuals safeguarded in relation to potential modern slavery.

In addition, officers seized more than £40,000 in cash, some 200,000 cigarettes, 7,000 packs of tobacco, over 8,000 illegal vapes and two vehicles. Two cannabis farms were also found, containing a total of 150 plants. Ten shops have been shut, with further closures expected as a result of on-going investigations. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

The NCA estimates that £12bn of criminal cash is generated in the UK each year, which is typically smuggled out of the country or integrated into the legitimate financial system using a variety of laundering techniques. Cash-intensive businesses such as barbershops, vape shops, nail bars, American-themed sweet shops and car washes are often used by criminals to conceal the origins of illicit cash.

The structural problem, however, is much broader in scope. I noted a few weeks back the backlog in food safety inspections where some new take-aways have never had an inspection. Severe backlogs are also reported in care home inspections. Expanding this line of inquiry we find that the same dynamic exists for HMO fire safety inspections. We also find that two-thirds of English councils have not prosecuted a single landlord in past three years. Councils prosecuted just 64 landlords despite receiving 300,000 complaints from tenants in unfit homes.

Another report says UK Environment Agency prosecutions are 6% of the level they were a decade ago. In 2025, the UK saw a total of 174 environmental-related enforcement cases, which amounted to £11 million in fines. This is 29 fewer cases than last year and a drop of £14 million in total penalties. This continues the decline in enforcement actions by environmental regulators over the last 15 years. Meanwhile, more than 70 UK councils failed to issue single fine for littering last year.

In other news, fraud continues to be under-enforced. The Serious Fraud Office has not concluded a single prosecution this year. Part of this is due to the huge delays in economic crime cases being heard at court. Backlogs in the courts now exceed 70,000, while more than a quarter (27%) of all trials are adjourned, and only 43% go ahead on time. The lack of judicial sitting days and barristers is primarily to blame.

These delays are having a huge impact on economic crime cases, which in the case of fraud amounts to 40% of all criminal activity. Delays incentivise suspects to drag things out longer, creating a vicious cycle of even further delays.

Elsewhere, Shelter reports that under the Renters’ Rights Act, councils will be legally obliged to enforce new legislation designed to clamp down on rogue landlords from 1 May 2026. But councillors have warned MPs that austerity has gutted housing enforcement teams, meaning new tenant rights will remain largely “symbolic” without sufficient funding.

It seems that anywhere you look, enforcement activities are collapsing, along with prosecutions. For years now we've been watching the collapse of the administrative state, where important regulation is increasingly meaningless because there is no real penalty for non-compliance. From trading standards through to housing inspection and environmental crimes and serious fraud, there is a diminishing chance of being caught.

Part of the reason for this is the same reason councils are cutting back on mending potholes and collecting rubbish. They are completely hamstrung by statutory obligations, accounting for most of their spend increases. We're passing more laws all the time, but there's no resource for enforcement activity or prosecutions.

As such, any party pledging to tackle this scourge must have a plan for containing SEND and adult social care spend, necessitating a bonfire of statutory obligations. They also need a plan to tackle the backlog in courts, restoring local magistrates courts and improving central supervision of inspectorates. This is absolutely essential if we want to tackle the pull factors for illegal immigrants, and shut down the businesses associated with grooming.

But that’s not enough. The training of professional officers must be addressed. Most are now degree courses, which means that potential recruits have to saddle themselves with huge debt to qualify for modestly-paid jobs with relatively limited career prospects. It used to be the case that recruits could complete paid, in-service training, learning on the job - which produced better-trained officers who were already well experienced by the time they qualified. We urgently need to rebuild institutional local knowledge.

It must be understood that the slide towards third-worldism is precisely because we have so many laws but so little enforcement. Enforcement cannot be done on the cheap, and it cannot be done without a functioning court system. If you want to live in a first world country then these are the corners you don’t cut.

Not wishing to congratulate myself, but my recent posts have been interesting and informative - to me at least. I learned things, and I have some more lines of inquiry to follow up on. The more I understand about the policy landscape, the scale of the task in repairing it, and the dilemmas therein, the more I’m convinced that the British right is absolutely hopeless, and wouldn’t succeed in government. They’d be learning on the job, the hard way, by which time it’s going to be too late.

This has been my general assumption for some time now, which brought me to the conclusion that if there is to be an alternative party them it simply cannot be a populist derivative of Ukip. But now the field is crowded with dross, there is no bandwidth for a new party, and the right will all pile in behind Rupert Lowe just to be led up the garden path again.

As such, the only hope for even a vaguely competent party capable of forming a functioning government, whether I like it or not, is the Tory party, but the old rule still applies. Never trust a Tory. This only reinforces my view that we’re not voting our way out of this - not any time soon, anyway.

But this causes me something of a problem. I’ve tailored much of my content to the dissident right, essentially because I’m still of that ilk, but I’ve managed to alienate just about everybody by saying in less than refined terms that all of the current enterprises on the right are, in fact, a big pile of horse manure.

It doesn’t help either that I’m an obsessive bore who writes at a rate faster than my readers have the bandwidth for, meaning the harder I work, the smaller my audience, thus the smaller my income. I’ve lost seven paying subscribers in the last three weeks.

That said, I make no apology for it. It’s who I am. I’m not famed for my finesse or my capacity to suffer fools, and I stand firmly by my conclusions. Even my detractors will privately admit I’ve got a point. That’s why I’m going to keep saying what I say and doing what I do whether anyone wants to hear it or not. I have every confidence I will again be vindicated, sadly.

As such, that makes you, dear reader, one of the dwindling few with the stamina and patience to keep up with my thinking, so you obviously do see some value in what I do. On that basis, I would like you to consider a paid subscription to this Substack, because at a mere £6 a month, you’re getting more policy ideas and analysis in a month than all of the alternative parties combined over the course of a year - and as we creep closer to the general election, it’s only going to get better. I’d call that a bargain.

A subscription will support further developments to manifestoproject.org. It’s been in the doldrums for a few months because I like to step away from it now and then to let the issues percolate, but it’s now due for a substantial re-write, developing some of the weaker policies such as welfare and tax reform. I still plan on some supporting video content while I’m still relatively young and beautiful. To those of you who still subscribe, you have my sincerest thanks.